Citizen Science and Education
What we do – Citizen Science and Education
You too can understand, assess and improve local and indoor air quality
For over 10 years we have been working with schools and organisations like Nanogirl Labs and House of Science to empower students, householders, businesses and communities to discover the power they have to influence the air quality around them.
We provide:
- Independent advice
- Expert witness
- Public speaking and webinars
- Educational resources, activities and projects
- Participatory air monitoring programmes for communities
- Air management resources for classrooms
The Air Quality Collective
Current and recent projects
Smart Home Air Quality System
-What's the Issue? The air in your home can be contaminated from both outside and within. It may be smoke from wood-fires, rural burning, or bushfires. It might be dust or chemicals from industry, or particulates from trucks. But it could also be viruses, excess...
Smoke in the Alexandra-Clyde Basin
Through 2025 The Air Quality Collective is working with Otago Regional Council to find out more about the contribution of open burning to smoke in the air in the Alexandra-Clyde Basin. What’s the issue? During winter, smoke from home heating has long been known to...
The Air We Share: Helping teachers and students to improve air quality in classrooms
Many teachers know that period 3 brain fog, when the children in front of them slump their shoulders and everything seems harder. It could be stale air. Without good ventilation contaminants can build up, including other people’s breath. And that breath could contain...
Recent blog posts
Latest news and blogs
Portable air cleaners are great, but they could be better
Portable air cleaners – by which I mean domestic appliances that use a fan to pass air over a HEPA filter and are sometimes referred to as PACs – often claim to remove 99.9% of bad stuff (viruses, smoke, dust) from the air. If that were true, why are we all not using...
Does New Zealand have an air quality problem?Part three: Mouldy homes, stuffy offices, infectious interiors
New Zealand has some of the sweetest, purest, clearest clean air anywhere in the world. Most of the time. In most places. This is the continuing story of those other times and places. New Zealand is harbouring four guilty secrets about its air – four situations...
Indoor Air Quality Research Centre of New Zealand calls for government prioritisation on ventilation this World Ventil8 Day
As the world faces the challenge of maintaining healthy indoor environments in an era of pandemics and climate change, World Ventil8 Day 2024 is set to spotlight the critical role of ventilation in enhancing health and wellbeing. This year’s theme “Enabling Action”...
What is air pollution?
So what is air pollution? Pollution is bad. The word ‘pollution’ conjures up images of something dark, something menacing, something nasty that turns up where it shouldn’t. The notion of something clean and pure being invaded by something repulsive or distasteful that...